Gene Karshenboym

Hacker News (HN) for me is a daily source for technical and start-up information, which I cherish. Aside from the articles themselves, I believe one of the main values of HN are the comments posted below the outbound link which provide me with even more insight and ideas. In fact, I would say the comments in a lot of the situations add just as much to my knowledge base as the article itself.

Now the issues is this: I use Google Reader as my RSS feed reader. When I click on an article it opens it in a new window and the ‘comments’ link is left in the Reader window. If I want to read the comments also, I  need to click on the ‘comments’ link.

So here is my idea: any outbound link should be wrapped in a frame ala Google images search.

The little top frame should be 2 lines tall and include:

• link back to hacker news via the ‘H’ icon
• The name of the article as submitted
• A direct link to the comments (and maybe comment count?)
• An expand button which would change the frame split to 50%/50% and would load the comments there in a scrollable fashion
• Ability to Vote ‘+1′ on the article
• a small ‘X’ to kill HN frame

As much as I detest frames ( I received my fill by cruising  Geocities sites in 90′s), I believe this would not only foster more commenting on the HN side but also allow lurkers to receive more value from the commenting system on HN.

Ideas? Comments?

Link to the comments on HN for this article